For reasonably fast networks such as a 100MB LAN, most of the latency comes from the software, i.e. the time it takes the operating system to get the data from an application and out onto the network card.
See Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks", 3rd edition, if you are interested in learning more, its a good introduction to networking in general. From pg 562: "Rule #1, CPU speed is more important than network speed". "Long experience has shown that in nearly all networks, operating system and protocol overhead (emphasis mine) dominates actual time on the wire." He goes on to demonstrate that although the theoretical minimum delay getting a frame out onto an 802.3 is 102 microsecs, in practice, it can take up to 15 times longer than that just to get the frame out - the delay is in the software, and protocols make up a large part of the problem.
It isn't about bandwidth. Networks are measured by two things: bandwidth and latency, or the product of these, "bandwidth latency product". For a network to perform well both of these things needs to be good, but on most current networks the bottleneck is not the bandwidth (especially for a game like Quake, where there are lots of small packets, so improving the latency improves the feel of the game more readily than bandwidth improvements.)
Its not uncommon for a packet to be copied in memory 4 or more times from when the application sends it until it gets out onto the wire. Quake uses UDP, which sits on IP, which gets wrapped into an 802.3 frame on a LAN (after doing some arp cache checking of course), and as well as being wrapped up several times, extra copying is also involved in passing the data from the app down to the drivers (and normally within an application itself). All this crap takes time (see "Rule #4: Minimize copying"). Optimising the protocols and software can have a very noticeable effect on network performance. Windows98SE's TCP/IP stack is noticably slower than NT's (I've done some tests copying large numbers of files, typically 30 to 50 % quicker) - this is why they used NT's TCP stack in WinMe, and its also why John Carmack was itching to work on the Linux IP stack a few months ago, to try prod MS into doing something about the lousy performance of Win98's networking. "Rule #5: YOu can buy more bandwidth but not lower delay".
The design and optimization of protocols has a big influence on network performance.
1) kernel+shell+X11, 2) window manager, 3) other parts of shell and X11
In my experience I would say Windows is more like: 1) Kernel, 2) GDI, 3) X11 + window manager (tangled together), 4) Shell (perhaps differing terminology here) (in Windows, the default shell is explorer.exe, which is that task bar thing with the start menu -> this is just an application and you can change it, but doesn't change the stuff that X would assign to the WM, such as how window pane borders look etc. That stuff is handled in base windproc as "non-client" area messages, so your application can override them (they are very poorly documented), but they are handled in your applications thread - so the main difference a user might feel is that under X, if an application is hanging or keeping its thread busy, you can still move its window around, but if an application is hanging in Win32 (or just keeping the thread busy and not handling messages) then you can't move the window around).
The GDI layer is probably more the equivalent of X11 actually, and the window manager doesn't really exist - windows are basically managed by the application thread, and the common look and feel for apps stems from that they all derive behaviour from one standard message handling procedure. So it would be like not having a WM loaded in X, and all applications inherit from (say) a special GTK+ widget that draws the window borders etc. Its not a bad overall design *conceptually*, but its a fairly ugly API in practice.
What's the advantage of Motif over something like Windows?
I was going to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "Win32" until I read the rest of the post. I don't think he understands what the difference is between a widget toolkit (GTK+, Motif, GUI portion of Win32 API), an operating system (Windows, MacOS), and a desktop environment (KDE).
Themes are supported (and Windows was the first OS to really allow this anyway).
I can't decide if this is complete native cluelessness, or a plain and simple flamebait/troll. Really, not one of the UI toolkits "allows" or "disallows" theming - some just make it easier to do than others - and quite frankly, theming in Win32 is a fscking nightmare, messing with crappily documented non-client area messages, superclassing windprocs etc. If anything they tried hard to make it NOT themable (apart from the plus pack allowing you to set some colours, fonts and a background picture, that doesn't count, you aren't changing the UI.)
Just to make I sure I understand what you're saying - Quake3arena becomes an embedded ActiveX control in Microsoft Word? And I can embed, say, a C++ compiler and IDE into one of the textures in Quake?
Really - the arguments all make sense if you don't see a computer as a general-purpose information-processing tool, but rather as an appliance that performs a few specific, dedicated tasks (the usual standard stuff that almost anybody has to do, like word processing, email and web browsing, whoopee.)
The fact is, a computer is a general-purpose tool - and there are THOUSANDS of types of applications, from games, to architectural packages, database tools, accounting packages, photo-editing, 3D modelling and rendering, PCB layout software, magic 8-ball, and literally hundreds more. You simply cannot embed anything into anything, it no longer makes sense, some of these things are so far removed from each other.
To me, being able to have my desktop and all programs available
from ANY WEB BROWSING DEVICE is unbelievably cool
To me, the concept of having my desktop and all programs available from any computer in the world sounds just like what Unix/X could do, and was designed to do, some 20 or so years ago (lack of bandwidth notwithstanding, the design is there). If there was any "vision" around here, it was very long ago - none of these concepts are at all new. I find it quite ironic that Microsoft's big.net "innovative" vision for the future is, functionality-wise, a leaf from 20 year old Unix books. Of course, most people today know almost nothing about Unix, all they know about is Windows, so when MS propaganda material tells them its new and innovative, they don't know any better than to believe it. PS it will take quite a bit longer than 2 to 3 years for this stuff to get any further than "early adopter" phase, especially if you also think that people in 3rd world countries, who don't have super-high-speed connections, should also be able to use computers. My guess it will take closer to 10 years before available bandwidth becomes sufficient to make widespread use of such technologies viable.
And I tend to agree with Somnus about territory. My PC is a piece of personal territory. I store my personal documents and emails on my computer just like I store my personal belongings in my cupboard inside my own home. I don't want those files on some server thousands of miles away, where who-knows who else will be reading them; I certainly would not store all my personal belongings in some communal storage device that everybody in the neighbourhood used, and that some random guy called the "administrator" had access to everybodys stuff.
The idea of walking up to a PC in sleep mode and hitting a button, which would instantly activate a specific app, is compelling. The OS would manage all the applications
in the background. If you wanted to switch apps, you hit another hot key
Perhaps I don't really get what he has in mind, but I don't see how this can work in practice. It might almost work if there were only about 20 or 30 different possible applications that people might want to run, but computers are really versatile, and in reality there are thousands of different applications of hundreds of genres. Computers are general-purpose information-manipulation tools - it would be a tragic waste if they were limited to a few basic commonly used types of apps (word processing, spreadsheet, webbrowsing, email, graphics, and thats it). But there are so many other types of applications that people want to use. Architects want architectural programs. Engineers want apps like matlab, spice, PCB layout programs etc. Graphic designers have a slew of applications like 3DStudioMAX (with numerous plugins) and Adobe Photoshop (with numerous plugins.) Accountants (and home users) want to use accounting programs. And what about games? Who wants several apps in the background slowing down the PC when you're playing Quake3? And there are thousands of very specialised.apps that people run for whatever lame reasons, like lottery number generators, 8-ball etc. Are these apps all downloaded on demand over unbelievably high bandwidth connections? Sounds a bit like.net, but why make computing go backwards? Why throw away perfectly good low-cost high-capacity hard disk technology? Should everybody in the world (including 3rd world countries) suddenly have to have high-speed connections to use their computers? Either way I don't see how you could just 'hit a button' to switch to whatever app. You're still going to need a framework of menus and other "klunky" interface widgets - if anything, you're going to need them more than ever, since there will probably be hundreds of thousands of applications out on the ".net" (or whatever it is) that you'll want to peruse and use.
The amount of legacy [read: crufty non-elegant stuff] code in today's OS 9x is still far too much
Funnily enough, I tend to feel that way about both Windows and Linux too. (I'm not trying to diss Linux, but face it, there is a lot of legacy stuff there - and no, I'm not saying that old automatically equals bad, some of its good, but some of it isn't)
Not with your post, which makes perfect sense, but with your subject line. I don't think its a "nice concept" at all, I think its a really stupid concept. As others have pointed out, there are way too many cases where one legitimately has to break the speed limit (e.g. common one, when overtaking, and you suddenly need more speed because a car is approaching you in the opposite lane)
than giving birth. Say you've started overtaking someone on the highway, and a car appears from the front, and you realise you need to floor it to make it past the guy you're overtaking. If you can't slow down and pull back behind the person (which is often the case as the people behind you pull up closer) then you're fucked, bigtime.
I can only speculate that a clueless moderator, who didn't read the article and doesn't know about veronica, thought that the post was an "Archie comics" joke. Whow knows?
Difficult to say./. moderation is oftentimes very suspect. The most common abuse is to mod somebody as "flamebait" because you don't agree with what they're saying, even if the post is insightful.
"They only make sense for people to stupid and unimaginative to know they can walk away from a job and join a competing company or start their own company if they don't like where they are"
Firstly, not everybody WANTS to start a company (duh) - quite frankly, thats much harder work and longer hours than a 9-hour a day programming job. Secondly, not everybody is in a situation where it is at all possible to just walk out of their job and walk into a new super-amazing spiffo job tomorrow - if you don't happen to live in high-cost-of-living silicon valley, there are many areas in the States where the demand for skilled tech workers is very mediocre. And, believe it or not, not everybody wants to move across several states just to get a nicer job.
Speak for yourself. Consider, just for a brief moment, that maybe other people have different situations to yourself.
Chances are that if you're being offered stock & options, you aren't at one of the many companies who are screwing their employees big-time, so why would you want to strike anyway? Striking is for those who are being screwed by their employers, i.e. those that aren't being offered stock, don't get compensated properly for their many hours overtime, etc. And it happens more than some people here care to realise, many seem to shrug it off with "I'm such a damn brilliant amazing programmer that everyone is just offering me really amazing jobs all the time etc etc." Come on.. who are these people fooling? A "great-sounding job offer" is not the same as a "great job" - job offers are supposed to attract you - they almost always sound a lot better than they really are. And sure, salaries are super high in silicon valley, but then so is the cost of living, so you blow a lot of it on rent etc anyway. And while there may be a lot of demand in Silicon Valley for skilled tech workers, the situation is NOT the same elsewhere in the states - there are places in the States where it is fairly difficult to get a tech job, and you *can't* just walk out of any job and walk into any other job you want to, anytime. The same everywhere in the world.
I wasn't as impressed as you seem to be, at least not with the Quake1 source code (I can't comment on the doom source code). It certainly wasn't bad code, it was relatively well thought out, and relatively neat, but poorly commented, and the use of #define's and the plentiful use of function pointers in some cases made it pretty obscure and confusing to determine what was getting called when, and what parts of the code were supposed to do what (particularly since comments are so scarce.)
of course, the only part I looked at though was the socket-level network code, so perhaps the other parts were better, I don't know. But I don't remember being overly impressed with the code. Not unimpressed, but not impressed either.
"Equally interesting would be code that really is bad, as long as it didn't turn into direct attacks upon the programmers involved (they can't all be gems!) Any code that shows elegant and masterful design "
Some of the most "elegant and masterful design" I've ever seen is code from the obfuscated C coding competition (http://www.ioccc.org/); it may often look pretty atrocious to the "untrained eye", but there are some pretty amazing examples of masterful design - and good design is something beautiful in itself, no matter how aesthetically displeasing it may be to the average Joe's eye. Huge industrial structures like, say, oil rigs, often look ugly to the general public, but I guarantee you, to the engineers who design and build such things, the people who can appreciate the achievement in building such things, they are often seen as beautiful.
So explain to me how exactly this post is off-topic? When did/. moderation become so lousy?
Re:Small niggle with the article
on
2.2 vs 2.4
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· Score: 2
I also thought that that assertion was suspect, based on my own "real world usage" experiences. The motherboard drivers for my PCs (I have 3, all the same config) at work have an option to enable ATA-66 mode or not when you install them. We're developing an application that requires loading a large landscape database (these are PIII 700s with 512 MB RAM). When the option is not enabled, loading the landscape takes on average 35 to 40 seconds. When enabled, the load time drops to, on average, just under 20 seconds. Nothing else on the configuration was different, only that, and those values are the average of many load times.
the market had done the work it is supposed to do and IBM was on it's way out
"The market" didn't do that - many years of fairly heavy regulation of IBM's business practices did that. Sorry, but unregulated capitalism does not work well at all.
Perhaps you forget, but Rasterman actually gets paid to develop Enlightenment. If I was his boss I would have told him long ago to get something finished or get out.
And where the hell do you get the idea that people are only allowed to complain about things if they themselves are actively working on something like that? I paid for a boxed RedHat. If you pay for a car, do you feel that you're only allowed to whinge if the doors fall if if you yourself build cars? If you pay taxes to the government so that they can build roads, and the roads are full of potholes, do you only have the right to complain about it if you yourself help build roads? If you pay taxes to the government for decent schooling for you children, are you only allowed to complain if their schooling sucks if you yourself are helping to build schools? Don't be ridiculous. Get real. I don't have to write wm's to have a right to call other wm's as I see them.
"Than" and "then" sound very different when spoken in a good old South African accent. In general though I don't have that problem at all, I've never had much of a problem with spelling. I think its a genetic thing or something, some (otherwise intelligent) people seem to struggle with spelling. Or maybe it has do with how much a person reads. Reads books, that is, not websites like slashdot.
So you're saying that we're not going to see any new technologies because it is rare for a new technology to become mainstream? That's ridiculous - of course we'll be seeing new technologies appear, sooner or later. Sure, most fail, but not all of them.
Hey stupid, I didn't say ANYTHING about whether or not html is TECHNICALLY a good way to do wysiwig, you just made that assumption yourself. HTML is crap for wysiwig, we all know that - but my point stands - the majority of people wanted something closer to wysiwig than html was, but html was the only thing available - thus html became a sort of de-facto standard for doing it, and hence all the crap thats been tethered onto it to make it more wysiwig-design-friendly. That is just the way it turned out (perhaps, since you seem to know so much about engineering, you will have heard about "de facto" standards?) There are hundreds of sub-standard standards in common use simply because people happened to adopt them, not because they were technically the best for the job. And no matter how much you whine about it, you are NOT going to change it, because people just *naturally* chose html. So why not just accept that that is what people have chosen, and improve it, rather than spend the rest of your life whining on a soap-box to people who aren't going to listen anyway? You're wasting your time. Get over it - html is not just a general markup language anymore, and YOU CAN'T CHANGE THAT.
"HTML's purpose is not WYSIWYG publishing. Get over it"
HTML's original intended may have been to be a general markup language, but it certainly isn't just that anymore. Things *are* what they *become*, no matter what they were originally intended to be. Get over it.
"State owned business (no monopolies screwing us)"
Uh.. a state-owned business IS a big monopoly that screws you. Ask South Africans about Telkom.. (no longer state-owned, technically, but still a government protected monopoly under a communist-like scheme..).. there is NO incentive for state-owned companies to improve their products and services, so the best affordable connection you can get here happens to be a 56k modem.
Better yet, ask somebody living under a truly Communist government (rather than a pseudo-communist government that pretends to be capitalist like ours) how good the services are. (Regulated) capitalism still wins, hands down, even though it sucks so much. The least-bad of all alternatives, it would seem. The problem with USA capitalism, it seems, is that the government is a pawn of big business, and its supposed to be a pawn of the people. But that does not mean that capitalism is at fault - it just means that americans should try to keep tighter reins on the government. With things like DMCA, I get the impression that the people have not too much control currently over what the government does.
I don't know if Magic might just be trend, but FPS gaming is definitely not "just a trend", so I doubt it will die completely, and I'm sure you will see people eventually making a living off of it. FPS is tending toward "sport" status, which means you'll be seeing more and more competitions etc, much like games like pool. You can play pool informally for smallish bets in bars etc - a bit like what this article is about. At the next level you can play in small local competitions as a hobby, aside from your real job. Finally, a tiny minority of really talented people will make a living off of doing only this - the FPS equivalent of people like Jimmy White and Steve Davis of pool/snooker. This is the direction FPS gaming is going. I doubt it will ever become one of the primary spectator sports though (e.g. like baseball in the states, rugby/football/cricket etc.)
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For reasonably fast networks such as a 100MB LAN, most of the latency comes from the software, i.e. the time it takes the operating system to get the data from an application and out onto the network card.
See Tanenbaum's "Computer Networks", 3rd edition, if you are interested in learning more, its a good introduction to networking in general. From pg 562: "Rule #1, CPU speed is more important than network speed". "Long experience has shown that in nearly all networks, operating system and protocol overhead (emphasis mine) dominates actual time on the wire." He goes on to demonstrate that although the theoretical minimum delay getting a frame out onto an 802.3 is 102 microsecs, in practice, it can take up to 15 times longer than that just to get the frame out - the delay is in the software, and protocols make up a large part of the problem.
It isn't about bandwidth. Networks are measured by two things: bandwidth and latency, or the product of these, "bandwidth latency product". For a network to perform well both of these things needs to be good, but on most current networks the bottleneck is not the bandwidth (especially for a game like Quake, where there are lots of small packets, so improving the latency improves the feel of the game more readily than bandwidth improvements.)
Its not uncommon for a packet to be copied in memory 4 or more times from when the application sends it until it gets out onto the wire. Quake uses UDP, which sits on IP, which gets wrapped into an 802.3 frame on a LAN (after doing some arp cache checking of course), and as well as being wrapped up several times, extra copying is also involved in passing the data from the app down to the drivers (and normally within an application itself). All this crap takes time (see "Rule #4: Minimize copying"). Optimising the protocols and software can have a very noticeable effect on network performance. Windows98SE's TCP/IP stack is noticably slower than NT's (I've done some tests copying large numbers of files, typically 30 to 50 % quicker) - this is why they used NT's TCP stack in WinMe, and its also why John Carmack was itching to work on the Linux IP stack a few months ago, to try prod MS into doing something about the lousy performance of Win98's networking. "Rule #5: YOu can buy more bandwidth but not lower delay".
The design and optimization of protocols has a big influence on network performance.
1) kernel+shell+X11, 2) window manager, 3) other parts of shell and X11
In my experience I would say Windows is more like: 1) Kernel, 2) GDI, 3) X11 + window manager (tangled together), 4) Shell (perhaps differing terminology here) (in Windows, the default shell is explorer.exe, which is that task bar thing with the start menu -> this is just an application and you can change it, but doesn't change the stuff that X would assign to the WM, such as how window pane borders look etc. That stuff is handled in base windproc as "non-client" area messages, so your application can override them (they are very poorly documented), but they are handled in your applications thread - so the main difference a user might feel is that under X, if an application is hanging or keeping its thread busy, you can still move its window around, but if an application is hanging in Win32 (or just keeping the thread busy and not handling messages) then you can't move the window around).
The GDI layer is probably more the equivalent of X11 actually, and the window manager doesn't really exist - windows are basically managed by the application thread, and the common look and feel for apps stems from that they all derive behaviour from one standard message handling procedure. So it would be like not having a WM loaded in X, and all applications inherit from (say) a special GTK+ widget that draws the window borders etc. Its not a bad overall design *conceptually*, but its a fairly ugly API in practice.
What the hell? How did this get modded up to +3?
What's the advantage of Motif over something like Windows?
I was going to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "Win32" until I read the rest of the post. I don't think he understands what the difference is between a widget toolkit (GTK+, Motif, GUI portion of Win32 API), an operating system (Windows, MacOS), and a desktop environment (KDE).
Themes are supported (and Windows was the first OS to really allow this anyway).
I can't decide if this is complete native cluelessness, or a plain and simple flamebait/troll. Really, not one of the UI toolkits "allows" or "disallows" theming - some just make it easier to do than others - and quite frankly, theming in Win32 is a fscking nightmare, messing with crappily documented non-client area messages, superclassing windprocs etc. If anything they tried hard to make it NOT themable (apart from the plus pack allowing you to set some colours, fonts and a background picture, that doesn't count, you aren't changing the UI.)
Just to make I sure I understand what you're saying - Quake3arena becomes an embedded ActiveX control in Microsoft Word? And I can embed, say, a C++ compiler and IDE into one of the textures in Quake?
Really - the arguments all make sense if you don't see a computer as a general-purpose information-processing tool, but rather as an appliance that performs a few specific, dedicated tasks (the usual standard stuff that almost anybody has to do, like word processing, email and web browsing, whoopee.)
The fact is, a computer is a general-purpose tool - and there are THOUSANDS of types of applications, from games, to architectural packages, database tools, accounting packages, photo-editing, 3D modelling and rendering, PCB layout software, magic 8-ball, and literally hundreds more. You simply cannot embed anything into anything, it no longer makes sense, some of these things are so far removed from each other.
To me, being able to have my desktop and all programs available from ANY WEB BROWSING DEVICE is unbelievably cool
To me, the concept of having my desktop and all programs available from any computer in the world sounds just like what Unix/X could do, and was designed to do, some 20 or so years ago (lack of bandwidth notwithstanding, the design is there). If there was any "vision" around here, it was very long ago - none of these concepts are at all new. I find it quite ironic that Microsoft's big .net "innovative" vision for the future is, functionality-wise, a leaf from 20 year old Unix books. Of course, most people today know almost nothing about Unix, all they know about is Windows, so when MS propaganda material tells them its new and innovative, they don't know any better than to believe it. PS it will take quite a bit longer than 2 to 3 years for this stuff to get any further than "early adopter" phase, especially if you also think that people in 3rd world countries, who don't have super-high-speed connections, should also be able to use computers. My guess it will take closer to 10 years before available bandwidth becomes sufficient to make widespread use of such technologies viable.
And I tend to agree with Somnus about territory. My PC is a piece of personal territory. I store my personal documents and emails on my computer just like I store my personal belongings in my cupboard inside my own home. I don't want those files on some server thousands of miles away, where who-knows who else will be reading them; I certainly would not store all my personal belongings in some communal storage device that everybody in the neighbourhood used, and that some random guy called the "administrator" had access to everybodys stuff.
The idea of walking up to a PC in sleep mode and hitting a button, which would instantly activate a specific app, is compelling. The OS would manage all the applications in the background. If you wanted to switch apps, you hit another hot key
Perhaps I don't really get what he has in mind, but I don't see how this can work in practice. It might almost work if there were only about 20 or 30 different possible applications that people might want to run, but computers are really versatile, and in reality there are thousands of different applications of hundreds of genres. Computers are general-purpose information-manipulation tools - it would be a tragic waste if they were limited to a few basic commonly used types of apps (word processing, spreadsheet, webbrowsing, email, graphics, and thats it). But there are so many other types of applications that people want to use. Architects want architectural programs. Engineers want apps like matlab, spice, PCB layout programs etc. Graphic designers have a slew of applications like 3DStudioMAX (with numerous plugins) and Adobe Photoshop (with numerous plugins.) Accountants (and home users) want to use accounting programs. And what about games? Who wants several apps in the background slowing down the PC when you're playing Quake3? And there are thousands of very specialised.apps that people run for whatever lame reasons, like lottery number generators, 8-ball etc. Are these apps all downloaded on demand over unbelievably high bandwidth connections? Sounds a bit like .net, but why make computing go backwards? Why throw away perfectly good low-cost high-capacity hard disk technology? Should everybody in the world (including 3rd world countries) suddenly have to have high-speed connections to use their computers? Either way I don't see how you could just 'hit a button' to switch to whatever app. You're still going to need a framework of menus and other "klunky" interface widgets - if anything, you're going to need them more than ever, since there will probably be hundreds of thousands of applications out on the ".net" (or whatever it is) that you'll want to peruse and use.
The amount of legacy [read: crufty non-elegant stuff] code in today's OS 9x is still far too much
Funnily enough, I tend to feel that way about both Windows and Linux too. (I'm not trying to diss Linux, but face it, there is a lot of legacy stuff there - and no, I'm not saying that old automatically equals bad, some of its good, but some of it isn't)
Not with your post, which makes perfect sense, but with your subject line. I don't think its a "nice concept" at all, I think its a really stupid concept. As others have pointed out, there are way too many cases where one legitimately has to break the speed limit (e.g. common one, when overtaking, and you suddenly need more speed because a car is approaching you in the opposite lane)
than giving birth. Say you've started overtaking someone on the highway, and a car appears from the front, and you realise you need to floor it to make it past the guy you're overtaking. If you can't slow down and pull back behind the person (which is often the case as the people behind you pull up closer) then you're fucked, bigtime.
I can only speculate that a clueless moderator, who didn't read the article and doesn't know about veronica, thought that the post was an "Archie comics" joke. Whow knows?
Difficult to say. /. moderation is oftentimes very suspect. The most common abuse is to mod somebody as "flamebait" because you don't agree with what they're saying, even if the post is insightful.
"They only make sense for people to stupid and unimaginative to know they can walk away from a job and join a competing company or start their own company if they don't like where they are"
Firstly, not everybody WANTS to start a company (duh) - quite frankly, thats much harder work and longer hours than a 9-hour a day programming job. Secondly, not everybody is in a situation where it is at all possible to just walk out of their job and walk into a new super-amazing spiffo job tomorrow - if you don't happen to live in high-cost-of-living silicon valley, there are many areas in the States where the demand for skilled tech workers is very mediocre. And, believe it or not, not everybody wants to move across several states just to get a nicer job.
Speak for yourself. Consider, just for a brief moment, that maybe other people have different situations to yourself.
Chances are that if you're being offered stock & options, you aren't at one of the many companies who are screwing their employees big-time, so why would you want to strike anyway? Striking is for those who are being screwed by their employers, i.e. those that aren't being offered stock, don't get compensated properly for their many hours overtime, etc. And it happens more than some people here care to realise, many seem to shrug it off with "I'm such a damn brilliant amazing programmer that everyone is just offering me really amazing jobs all the time etc etc." Come on .. who are these people fooling? A "great-sounding job offer" is not the same as a "great job" - job offers are supposed to attract you - they almost always sound a lot better than they really are. And sure, salaries are super high in silicon valley, but then so is the cost of living, so you blow a lot of it on rent etc anyway. And while there may be a lot of demand in Silicon Valley for skilled tech workers, the situation is NOT the same elsewhere in the states - there are places in the States where it is fairly difficult to get a tech job, and you *can't* just walk out of any job and walk into any other job you want to, anytime. The same everywhere in the world.
Sorry .. went into a bit of a rant there .. :)
I wasn't as impressed as you seem to be, at least not with the Quake1 source code (I can't comment on the doom source code). It certainly wasn't bad code, it was relatively well thought out, and relatively neat, but poorly commented, and the use of #define's and the plentiful use of function pointers in some cases made it pretty obscure and confusing to determine what was getting called when, and what parts of the code were supposed to do what (particularly since comments are so scarce.)
of course, the only part I looked at though was the socket-level network code, so perhaps the other parts were better, I don't know. But I don't remember being overly impressed with the code. Not unimpressed, but not impressed either.
"Equally interesting would be code that really is bad, as long as it didn't turn into direct attacks upon the programmers involved (they can't all be gems!) Any code that shows elegant and masterful design "
Some of the most "elegant and masterful design" I've ever seen is code from the obfuscated C coding competition (http://www.ioccc.org/); it may often look pretty atrocious to the "untrained eye", but there are some pretty amazing examples of masterful design - and good design is something beautiful in itself, no matter how aesthetically displeasing it may be to the average Joe's eye. Huge industrial structures like, say, oil rigs, often look ugly to the general public, but I guarantee you, to the engineers who design and build such things, the people who can appreciate the achievement in building such things, they are often seen as beautiful.
So explain to me how exactly this post is off-topic? When did /. moderation become so lousy?
I also thought that that assertion was suspect, based on my own "real world usage" experiences. The motherboard drivers for my PCs (I have 3, all the same config) at work have an option to enable ATA-66 mode or not when you install them. We're developing an application that requires loading a large landscape database (these are PIII 700s with 512 MB RAM). When the option is not enabled, loading the landscape takes on average 35 to 40 seconds. When enabled, the load time drops to, on average, just under 20 seconds. Nothing else on the configuration was different, only that, and those values are the average of many load times.
the market had done the work it is supposed to do and IBM was on it's way out
"The market" didn't do that - many years of fairly heavy regulation of IBM's business practices did that. Sorry, but unregulated capitalism does not work well at all.
Strangely, I also see the ?'s, and I'm browsing with IE 5 at the moment. The ?'s should be showing up under non-MS browsers, as I understand it.
Perhaps you forget, but Rasterman actually gets paid to develop Enlightenment. If I was his boss I would have told him long ago to get something finished or get out.
And where the hell do you get the idea that people are only allowed to complain about things if they themselves are actively working on something like that? I paid for a boxed RedHat. If you pay for a car, do you feel that you're only allowed to whinge if the doors fall if if you yourself build cars? If you pay taxes to the government so that they can build roads, and the roads are full of potholes, do you only have the right to complain about it if you yourself help build roads? If you pay taxes to the government for decent schooling for you children, are you only allowed to complain if their schooling sucks if you yourself are helping to build schools? Don't be ridiculous. Get real. I don't have to write wm's to have a right to call other wm's as I see them.
"Than" and "then" sound very different when spoken in a good old South African accent. In general though I don't have that problem at all, I've never had much of a problem with spelling. I think its a genetic thing or something, some (otherwise intelligent) people seem to struggle with spelling. Or maybe it has do with how much a person reads. Reads books, that is, not websites like slashdot.
So you're saying that we're not going to see any new technologies because it is rare for a new technology to become mainstream? That's ridiculous - of course we'll be seeing new technologies appear, sooner or later. Sure, most fail, but not all of them.
Hey stupid, I didn't say ANYTHING about whether or not html is TECHNICALLY a good way to do wysiwig, you just made that assumption yourself. HTML is crap for wysiwig, we all know that - but my point stands - the majority of people wanted something closer to wysiwig than html was, but html was the only thing available - thus html became a sort of de-facto standard for doing it, and hence all the crap thats been tethered onto it to make it more wysiwig-design-friendly. That is just the way it turned out (perhaps, since you seem to know so much about engineering, you will have heard about "de facto" standards?) There are hundreds of sub-standard standards in common use simply because people happened to adopt them, not because they were technically the best for the job. And no matter how much you whine about it, you are NOT going to change it, because people just *naturally* chose html. So why not just accept that that is what people have chosen, and improve it, rather than spend the rest of your life whining on a soap-box to people who aren't going to listen anyway? You're wasting your time. Get over it - html is not just a general markup language anymore, and YOU CAN'T CHANGE THAT.
"HTML's purpose is not WYSIWYG publishing. Get over it"
HTML's original intended may have been to be a general markup language, but it certainly isn't just that anymore. Things *are* what they *become*, no matter what they were originally intended to be. Get over it.
"State owned business (no monopolies screwing us)"
Uh .. a state-owned business IS a big monopoly that screws you. Ask South Africans about Telkom .. (no longer state-owned, technically, but still a government protected monopoly under a communist-like scheme ..) .. there is NO incentive for state-owned companies to improve their products and services, so the best affordable connection you can get here happens to be a 56k modem.
Better yet, ask somebody living under a truly Communist government (rather than a pseudo-communist government that pretends to be capitalist like ours) how good the services are. (Regulated) capitalism still wins, hands down, even though it sucks so much. The least-bad of all alternatives, it would seem. The problem with USA capitalism, it seems, is that the government is a pawn of big business, and its supposed to be a pawn of the people. But that does not mean that capitalism is at fault - it just means that americans should try to keep tighter reins on the government. With things like DMCA, I get the impression that the people have not too much control currently over what the government does.
I don't know if Magic might just be trend, but FPS gaming is definitely not "just a trend", so I doubt it will die completely, and I'm sure you will see people eventually making a living off of it. FPS is tending toward "sport" status, which means you'll be seeing more and more competitions etc, much like games like pool. You can play pool informally for smallish bets in bars etc - a bit like what this article is about. At the next level you can play in small local competitions as a hobby, aside from your real job. Finally, a tiny minority of really talented people will make a living off of doing only this - the FPS equivalent of people like Jimmy White and Steve Davis of pool/snooker. This is the direction FPS gaming is going. I doubt it will ever become one of the primary spectator sports though (e.g. like baseball in the states, rugby/football/cricket etc.)
Thanks.
I'm guilty as sin, I didn't read the article properly.